They're closing NORAD

Well, the mountain, anyways...

Report: Military Closing Mountain Complex:

The military is virtually closing the secretive defense complex carved into Cheyenne Mountain that for decades has monitored North American skies for threats, a newspaper reported.

The Denver Post reported late Thursday that the North American Aerospace Defense Command operations center will be moved to nearby Peterson Air Force Base, which is home to the U.S. Northern Command created after the Sept. 11 attacks.

NORAD, a joint U.S. and Canadian command, was set up in the 1960s to monitor the skies for threats like missiles, aircraft and space objects.

Adm. Tim Keating, who commands both NORAD and the U.S. Northern Command, said the government's best intelligence "leads us to believe a missile attack from China or Russia is very unlikely."

Granted, since the end of the cold war, the most any of us ever saw it was in repeats of Wargames, but still...I'm constantly seeing my present-past, stuff I always expected would exist forever (at least in my lifetime) disappearing...

On John Cage and "Art"

I just wrote this in the classical music group...

The intent of art, as Disney repeated in his tv shows in the 50s and 60s, is to invoke an emotional response out of the audient.

I would add that to my mind, great artists' work doesn't just invoke a response, it allows the audience to recreate in themselves the emotion that the artist himself was feeling at the time of the work's creation.

As a sophisticated example, take Bambi. Everything you feel, the filmmakers felt while making it, and if seeing the work didn't recreate the feeling the artists had in themselves, they went back and redid it so that it did. this wasn't just reinvoking the memory of the feeling, but the feeling itself.

To do this, each level of development had to acquire the feelings of the previous level, so Disney and the directors and had to capture the emotion of the book, then the storymen and music composers had to capture the feeling of the director, then the animators and layout had to capture the feeling from the storymen and the music, then the cleanup people, the ink and paint "girls", and the technicians working the camera and the sound mix had to hold onto that same feeling that still only existed as sound recordings and a bunch of paintings in pieces on glass and plastic. Yet the result still had the feeling that Disney had when he read the book and presented it to the team as a potential movie, now magnified in intensity by that shared collective team. and we in the audience continue to hold that same feeling in its magnified form. Artists at every step, carrying this feeling into a new medium.  For the brief 90 minutes we watch that film, we ourselves feel like artists...

Cage does none of this. Cage invokes emotions, but they're emotions he planned for the audience to have, not emotions I believe he himself felt. He's a manipulator of feelings, and i don't call that good art. He's more a Ciceronian, only he doesn't use words to get his point across.

Added later:

Even in music alone, this idea of sharing the emotion, passing it on, is critical. If a soloist for a piano solo, for example, isn't feeling the music and feeling the composer's intent and emotion, he is only presenting his own emotion to the audience and the performance falls flat. Its not enough just to have the performer's emotions in that type of work, the performer has to be a means of amplifying the composers emotions for it to work.

This is a reason I feel that many "superstar" performers from east asia, the stereotypical 5 year old girls who can play chopin, are missing the point. They are technically perfect, and as such can get the composers intent across, but they add nothing of themselves to it. Its an exercise in technique, but its not music.

An orchestra takes that even further. The conductor has to feel the composers intent and emotion, amplify it and present it to the orchestra so they can capture what he's presenting and turn it into sound, each adding their own emotions to the mix. If they're not feeling the music, but instead their own little frustrations, the performance still dies. But as the orchestra shares the feeling of the conductor, himself feeling the music and emotion and the reach of the composer across time and space through those little black markings on paper, something magical happens.